Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [142]
A man stood on the front porch, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his metal left arm glinting in the sunshine, watching the approaching four-wheel drive.
Jack West Jr.
Lily bounded out of the car and leapt into West’s arms.
‘You found me,’ he said. ‘Took you long enough.’
‘Where have you been?’ Lily asked. ‘What were these loose ends you had to tie up for a whole month?’
West grinned. ‘Why don’t you come and see.’
He led them behind the farmhouse, into an old abandoned mine hidden in the base of the low sandy hill back there.
‘Later today, like Imhotep III did at the Hanging Gardens, I’m going to trigger a landslide to cover the entrance to this mine,’ he said as they walked, ‘so that no-one will ever know that there’s a mine here, or what it contains.’
A hundred metres inside the mine, they came to a wide chamber and in the centre of the chamber stood. . .
. . . the Golden Capstone.
Nine feet tall, glittering and golden, and absolutely magnificent.
‘Pooh Bear and Stretch helped me get it to Australia. Oh, and Sky Monster, too,’ West said. ‘But I left them all at the dock in Fremantle. A little later I got them to help me pick up a few other things that we encountered on our adventures. Wizard, I thought you might like to keep one or two.’
Standing in a semi-circle on the far side of the Capstone were several other ancient items.
The Mirror from the Lighthouse at Alexandria.
The Pillar from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
Both last seen in Tunisia, inside Hamilcar’s Refuge.
‘You didn’t get the head of the Colossus of Rhodes?’ Wizard asked jokingly.
‘I was thinking of going after it in a few months, if you wanted to join me,’ West said. ‘I could use the help. Oh, and Zoe. . . ’
‘Yes, Jack. . . ’
‘I thought you might like a flower, as a token of thanks for your efforts these last ten years.’ With a flourish, he whipped something from behind his back and held it out to her.
It was a rose, a white rose of some kind, but one of unusual beauty.
Zoe’s eyes widened. ‘Where did you find this—?’
‘Some gardens I saw once,’ West said. ‘Alas, they’re no longer there. But this variety of rose is really rather resilient, and it’s taking in my front garden very well. I expect to develop quite a rosebush. Come on, it’s hot, let’s head inside and I’ll get some drinks.’
And so they left the abandoned mine and went back to the farmhouse, their shoes and boots caked in the unusual orange-red soil.
It was indeed a unique kind of soil, soil rich in iron and nickel, soil that was unique to this area: the north-western corner of what was now the most powerful nation on Earth . . . if only it knew it.
Australia.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I am indebted to a wonderful non-fiction book called Secret Chamber by the Egyptologist Robert Bauval. He’s the guy who deduced that the pyramids at Giza are laid out in imitation of the constellation Orion’s Belt.
It was from reading Secret Chamber that I discovered a Golden Capstone did indeed once sit atop the Great Pyramid at Giza. As an author, it’s wonderful when you discover something so big and so cool that it can be the ultimate goal of your story, and when I read about the Golden Capstone, I just leapt up and started dancing around my living room, because I’d found exactly that.
I am often asked ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ And this is the answer: I read a lot of non-fiction books, and if you read enough, you find gems like this. As a work on the darker side of ancient Egypt, with interesting sections on the Word of Thoth and the Sphinx, I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone keen on the subject of ancient Egypt.
On the home front, as always, my wife Natalie was a model of support and encouragement—reading draft after draft, letting me off doing chores around the house, and most of all, happily allowing our honeymoon in Egypt to morph into a quasi-research